Piazetzner meditation

I had referenced a meditation by the Piazetzner rebbe in another post and wanted to just spell out the meditation as I learned it.

This is a quieting meditation. The goal is to quiet the chatter of the mind and let the stillness fill the space.

Sit quietly and pay attention to your thoughts. Every time you think of something, say to yourself: I'm thinking of [Whatever it is you are thinking]. Try to be specific. An example would be: I'm thinking of doing the dishes, I'm thinking of cracks on the dishes, I'm thinking about cooking food for dinner tomorrow, etc... Every time you name what you are thinking about, you are decreasing it's power over you and your thoughts and drawing the power back to yourself.

The analogy that always comes to mind is of my children who are always coming up to show me things. If I try to push them away, they get annoyed and talk louder, but if I acknowledge what they are saying and pay a moments attention to them, they go back to playing and don't bother me anymore. In this meditation, we are doing the same thing to our thoughts.

Once your mind is clear. Recite the Shema silently. As you say each word, visualize it and allow it to drop into the still water of your mind. I always visualized this as watching the words slowly fall into a still pool of water.

As the last word drops into the water, ask for a gift or ask a question. Then wait and see what comes.

It's quite a wonderful meditation and especially good for finding insight in stressful times.

After a Spiritual Journey: Bread and Wine

I heard a wonderful teaching today from my teacher Avraham: according to Jewish tradition, when a person returns from a mercavah journey, having visited the heavenly palaces, and stood in the presence of God, the best thing to do is to eat and drink.

To me, this is pure technique: when someone has been meditating deeply or journeying, one of the best ways to ground oneself and bring oneself fully back to the physical world is to eat.

In Genesis 15:18, during the meeting of Avraham Avinu and King Melchizedek of Salem, we are told that "Malchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine". He then gives Avraham avinu a blessing.

Another story Avraham my teacher relayed was of a Hasidic rabbi who was known to rise up to the heavenly realm during prayer. He had a hasid (disciple) who's job it was to hand the Rabbi bread and butter when he finished praying so that he could return fully to this world.

I believe there is another textual source, but haven't been able to find it yet. I'll post when I do.

Preparation for Prayer

I've been to several Jewish Meditation groups where the meditation was a 15-20 minute silent meditation followed by regular prayers. My understanding is that the source for this (I'll try to find the actual source) is in the Talmud where it describes the first rabbi's taking an hour to prepare for praying.

This has never sat well with me, though I don't know why. It makes sense that someone wants to get in the right frame of mind to pray, but doing mindfulness meditation or just focusing on the breath didn't feel right for me.

Tonight, before devening evening prayers, I felt overwhelmed with fear. It's a fear I've been interacting with over the past few days, and it felt like I needed to sit with it for awhile before I prayed. I sat for awhile and then had particularly powerful davening, lots of energy, lots of souls.

And then it hit me, the line is "the first step in wisdom is fear of God", but I could never find any particular place in the liturgy that would give us a moment to feel our fear. So maybe this is what it's referring to: sit and feel your fear first, and then interact with God. Use that time at the beginning to be with your fear and that will open the way to use the prayers to talk to God.

I'm going to have to sit with this awhile longer and play around with it, but something feels right about it.